I'm a Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London, a writer here and there on this and that and strangely, one of the global experts on the metal scandium, one of the rare earths. An odd thing to be but someone does have to be such and in this flavour of our universe I am. I have written for The Times, Daily Telegraph, Express, Independent, City AM, Wall Street Journal, Philadelphia Inquirer and online for the ASI, IEA, Social Affairs Unit, Spectator, The Guardian, The Register and Techcentralstation. I've also ghosted pieces for several UK politicians in many of the UK papers, including the Daily Sport.

Don't Tell The Teamsters: But Driverless Trucks Are Already Here

I thought this was an interesting little piece about driverless trucks operating in an Australian mine. We’re in the middle of yet another technological revolution and as always, some will win and some will lose from this. I have a feeling that the biggest losers of this particular part of it will be unions like the Teamsters: although not without a very large fight, probably lasting decades, about it.

Mining company Rio TintoRio Tinto has turned to driverless trucks to operate mines in Western Australia.

The multinational digger has just confirmed it has let the trucks roam free at the Nammuldi iron ore mine, a hole in the ground located in more or less the middle of nowhere, as the nearest town, Tom Price, is 60km away. Nammuldi and Tom Price’s climates are unrelentingly unpleasant. Workers are hard to come by and the cost of living is high. Even those hardy folk that do work on site often do so on a ‘fly-in, fly-out’ basis that sees them spend a fortnight or so on site before retreating to a more pleasant locale.

Bots of any sort are therefore a very sensible idea.

One of the world’s largest mining truck manufacturers, KomatsuKomatsu, twigged to this a while ago and created an ‘Autonomous Haulage System’ dubbed ‘Frontrunner’ that sees its flagship 930E dump truck ‘driven’ by GPS.

Wages for truck drivers out at those remote mines are vast: $100,000 to $150,000 a year for working two weeks on, two off, are not unusual. Or, of course, the wages can be zero as no truck drivers at all are employed. Essentially, what we’re seeing is that automation at a wage price of $100,000 a year per driver is profitable.

So, we know that it’s possible to get trucks worked by robots. True, it’s a mine site, we’re not exactly talking about busy traffic here. However, look over to the other side of what’s going on, the GoogleGoogle driverless car project.

Google’s system is only working with cars at present. But it does indeed work in busy traffic, that much has been shown. It doesn’t take a genius to see that these two systems are going to intersect at some point: that it will be feasible, profitable and possible to run trucks on the usual city streets without drivers. And that’s really very different indeed.

For the usual purpose of a car is to transport someone from place to place. Whether they’re actually driving or the robot is, the whole point is still to have the person in the car. Yet this absolutely isn’t true for a truck. The driver is simply a cost that has to be dealt with: what we’re trying to do is get that essential delivery of pizza base, Twinkies or soft drinks from place to place. We only have a human along because we need the driver.

So, what happens to all those drivers’ jobs once we’ve got that combination of the Google style driverless car and the driverless truck from the mine? Exactly, as soon as the driverless technology is cheaper than the driver then those jobs will disappear. Simply evaporate. Assuming, that is, that the law allows driverless trucks to operate and the Teamsters don’t get legal protection for those jobs. Which is going to lead to a very interesting indeed battle I think in the years to come.

For I can see that automation of such jobs is going to become entirely possible. And I can also see that there’s going to be a very large fight about whether they should be. Finally, it’s going to be a fight that the drivers, the Teamsters, will lose in the end: the only question will be how long they manage to hold out.

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